Tech giant Google saw its India revenues grow 29 per cent to about Rs 9,338 crore in 2017-18 over the previous financial year, as per regulatory documents.

Google India’s total revenue was at Rs. 9,337.7 crore during 2017-18 as against Rs. 7,239.5 crore in 2016-17, according to Registrar of Companies filing shared by market intelligence firm Tofler.

The net profit was higher by about 33 per cent at Rs. 407.2 crore last fiscal as compared to Rs. 306.6 crore in the previous year.

Google India’s total expenses rose nearly 29 per cent to Rs. 8,710.9 crore from Rs. 6,760.4 crore in 2016-17 as the company continues to invest heavily in the fiercely competitive Indian market where it offers services like cloud and payments. The employee costs have also shot up. The company employs over 5,000 tech professionals, developers, data scientists and engineers in India.

According to the filing, advertising revenue contributed about 69 per cent of the company’s turnover, while the share of IT-enabled services stood at 18 per cent and that of IT services was at 13 per cent.

During 2017-18, Google India made 10 CSR grants, totalling about Rs 20.3 crore to NGOs working to improve the quality of education, and for safety of children. Besides, the NGOs used CSR grants to experiment with new technologies to enhance their work, and to create innovative new products to make work and teaching more accessible, it said.

Google India

Google, which set up its first India data centre in Mumbai just seven months ago, is already seeing a huge spike in its customer base. While several companies were using Google cloud services even before the internet giant brought its data centre to India, better data transfer speed is also helping Google grow its revenues in the country.

“We had a solid base even before the launch in the Mumbai region. A lot of customers were on the G-Suite. With the Mumbai region launch, we saw that there is a lot more that we can do with Google cloud around infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service,” Rick Harshman, Managing Director, Google Cloud Platform, APAC, told BusinessLine.

Search giant Google is reportedly trying to enter the e-commerce space in India and it is all set to launch an online storefront in November for all its branded hardware products.

Google storefront will display its branded hardware products

At present users can search retailers selling the listed products using the pre-launch version of storefront

After launch of the actual version, users will be redirected to partners page where they can pay and buy the product

With this development, a report in inc42.com states that Google will now be competing with Apple storefront. Both of the services are similar as Google store front too like Apple will be launching a website that will just display its branded and licensed hardware products.